


The Wise Man, Like the Fool

by MacaroniSwirls



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-24
Updated: 2011-11-24
Packaged: 2017-10-26 12:03:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/282879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MacaroniSwirls/pseuds/MacaroniSwirls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which is recorded a detailed description of the omnisciently predetermined encounters between the Signless and Demoness of the moon. Pale Handmaid  Sufferer if you squint.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wise Man, Like the Fool

When you first hear it, you aren’t sure what’s happening,just that there’s the sound of windchimes ringing through the air.

And then red light flashes over the earth, and you see her up in the air, not five feet in front of you. She’s intimidation and height glowing with power, and her very presence weighs the countdown towards death on your shoulders.

You feel something shift in your memory, something miniscule yet mindshattering.

When you look up, she’s gone.

You are left melancholic. There’s a teardrop in your eye, and in the next second, you’re sobbing.

You remember.

\------------

It’s hard not to run when she next arrives, a fully adult troll sauntering towards you. Your lusus said differently, however. She stooped down to face level with you, with a kind of grace only she could achieve, and she told you to wait. Wait, watch, and when they’re distracted, run. Run like there’s only hell out there behind you. People aren’t kind to those with obnoxious mutant blood.

The troll shifts, appears to settle on her back a bit more until she’s sitting comfortable next to you and alongside the lake. She stares at you, and you shiver a bit when you see her eyes are the solid colors only visible in psionics. She could rip you apart in seconds.

And then she speaks. “It’s all real, you know, what you remember.”

“Well…yeah. Memories are things that happened.”

She looks at you again, and oh shit, you said the wrong thing, you said something to make her angry, but then she shifts her focus away, back over the horizon. You look there too, wondering what you missed, when she talks again.

“You should know what I’m talking about. The memories of a different world. One where one’s destiny isn’t decided simply by caste.”

“No, they’re just dumb. Stupid daydreams.”

“They’re real and they haunt you because of that.”

It hurts to realize that what she just said is true.

“This world has no room for the weak. If you aren’t strong enough to change it, you aren’t strong enough to live. In the world you want, I might say to follow your dreams. In this one, my suggestion is ‘Force others to help you achieve them.’”

“Why are you even telling me this?”

“Through a sheer agglomeration of luck on your side, my master has deemed me to guide you on a path that should lead you to your desired destination.”

You blinked and she disappeared. At this moment, you find it opportune to run.

\------------

Over the next sweep, you lusus would tell you tales of the Demoness on the moon, and when you compared it with the girl you met on the lake, and it’s almost eerie how they match up. The black dress, the multi-colored flashing eyes, the master.

Her words were something that stuck in your head, however, like a buzzbeast on a new gluetrap. And somehow, despite the beginnings of your preaching, you aren’t dead. Your lusus has become a follower, and by the chance of fortune, she isn’t the only one.

Today, you go up and you do what you do everyday: preach. You preach of kindness, of acceptance, and basically how one can actually spend life without having to go and punch someone and proceed to rip out their intestines because one looked at them funny. The last one tended to be a huge problem due to the fact that ‘Lewd and Inappropriate Glances’ was a perfectly fine reason to punish someone with death according to the statues of the legislacerators.

This was one of the reasons The Signless had been nervous about wandering out to the districts of the higher castes. History had proven countless times that a revolution of simply the lowbloods is quickly overthrown, and simply leaves the rivers flowing red and yellow, glaring like the Alternian sun.

Ten came to listen. That was surprising enough – almost as surprising as the fact that as crowds gathered, no one gathered out weapons. And more importantly, they listened.  
You go from town to town, rising from the orange caste to the green caste and onward, and people are listening. The Sign of the Signless, the blank flag, is waving farther and farther across Alternia. You might possibly be winning this battle of ideologies, and that is what surprises you the most.

It’s almost a relief when, as you hit your first teal town, there is the royal arms of the Condense waiting for you. Things are still normal, at least, the power force is still trying to enforce its power. You aren’t simply living in some terrible cockamamie wriggler fairy tail where one can simply auspitice between all conflicts and get what one wants.

At least if you die tonight, you can be a martyr, and some vestige of your teachings can remain. You can die like a troll, instead of a coward.  
The troops raise their arms as you raise your flag.

The singing starts the moment the first signal to gunfire is called out.

It’s the sound that shoots itself inside your thinkpan and slowly sizzles there. Everyone pauses, and those single few notes take over the whole atmosphere, until they deconstruct the world and recreate one in its place.

It’s a shock when you all realize someone is actually singing it. There she hovers, her chopsticks at the ready, and there’s a pause. Not the pause of hesitation, but the pause of utter admiration for something beautiful.

And then the chopsticks flip within her hands, and lightning tendrils fork out and strike the ground like so many smitings. Strife weapons are out and they’re all shooting towards the same target, but somehow, none of them hit. You and you followers simply watch in awed fear, seeing psionic energy pierce through their vascular systems, limp bodies falling, the actions of a wrathful god.

When the crackling of energy slowly fades away, the notes still resound. She carefully places the chopsticks back within her hair, and she disappears in a way that you descendant would’ve described as ‘static on a husktop’.

The night before, the revolution was something the highbloods joked about. Now, it was something they feared.

The Signless sees how the stories match up, and he comes to the realization that the Demoness is on his side.

\------------

The Revolution is succeeding. They are marching towards the capital of the Grand Highblood, and once he is captured, it is only a matter of successfully getting the Condense.

Somehow, when he strolled down this path right before this ultimate battle, he wasn’t surprised to see her there. He wouldn’t have had his curiosity pricked if she knew he was going to come this way at this time her whole life. It was just something he had assumed to be a part of her nature.

“Signless, when you meet the Grand Highblood, you must not use violence. You must make sure that your followers swear to do none, also.” Her voice is the same it always is. Exact. It could perfectly measure each inch of one’s thoughts.

She turns, and you know that she’s going to be gone in a second, but you fully intend to add on several more moments before she leaves.

“Demoness, thank you.”

She pauses, and she’s shaken – a meowbeast that has just been flung into cold water.“What?”

“Thank you.”

“There is no reason to make such apologies. In time, you will see that there is absolutely no reason to thank me.” She stands firm as you dare a hand upon her shoulder, a careful ‘shoosh pap.’

“But I-“

“There is nothing that you need to do in thanks. You may take comfort in the fact that the one thing I truly want is the one thing that I will be getting very soon.”

“What?”

“I’ll be dead.”

There is a certain dreadful hope in her eyes, and you realize that that is the one time you have ever seen her smile.

\------------

You are going to break the chains. You will break these chains.

You pull, and your muscles grieve, but you ignore their mourning and pull harder. There is something more than just your life here. Even if your trusted group of followers is most likely dead, and even if all known followers of you are now becoming dirt for the worms, if you survive, there’s still a chance, some small, miniscule, chance that the revolution will also survive after its quite thorough beating by the Grand Highblood.

Like always, she never truly arrives. You turn, and she’s there, like she’s been waiting this whole time and you just now happened to notice her. It’s only when you look upon her glowing eyes, her glowing chopsticks, and her stern standing that YOU realize there’s a reason people fear her

“Sufferer, you cannot break those chains.”

“I can.”

“I know what your kind call me. The Demoness, raised by the Green Demon who lives within the moon. Signaler of Death. Handmaid. I know when it is one’s time to die.”

“I won’t bleed to death. I’m not going to die. I can’t.”

“Let me rephrase what I said earlier. It’s not that you cannot break those chains. It’s that you must not break those chains.”

“You told me that you’d help lead me to my goal! When I was a wriggler, you-“

“I doubt I said that. I probably said something implying that, but not something that could’ve directly led to that conclusion.”

You look at her, and you try to use the power that managed to calm the rest of your adversaries and even the Grand Highblood, but instead there is some power wriggling its way into your thoughts, squeezing around every memory and every idea.

The Handmaid gently lifts each of your eyelids down, as the power forcing itself into your mind tightens its hold, squeezing what is in its grasp until it snaps.

The Handmaid leaves, and it’s like she wasn’t even there.


End file.
